Lucent, IBM Partner to Provide "CyberCarriers" with Network Services

Lucent Technologies' NetworkCare Professional Services (NPS) and IBM (www.ibm.com) Global Services announced a worldwide alliance to help an emerging group of service providers called "CyberCarriers" more quickly and efficiently deliver network-based services to enterprises and consumers.

CyberCarriers are service providers who offer a combination of high-speed networking and data center services, including servers, storage, and network transport, to ASPs, ISPs, Web hosting companies, and others.

The alliance will draw on the CyberCarrier Reference Architecture developed by Lucent (www.lucent.com) in order to develop customer solutions. The architecture is the framework for the services alliance.

The alliance will focus on several solution areas. Business planning solutions will develop business and technology strategic road maps to help CyberCarriers to enter and expand into new businesses and grow revenues. Platform and application management will develop and support platforms and applications that help ensure rapid expansion of markets such as e-commerce, unified messaging, and hosting. In addition, the alliance will provide engineering solutions, security solutions, performance solutions, and site operations and facilities, as well as solution integration services. - Isaac Slepner

Microsoft updated an August security advisory this week to urge organizations using the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol in supported Windows systems to implement some configuration changes manually.